Signal Boosting Paramilitary Comrades Inside Google

Some - by which we mean 'enough' - termites baldly assert Google is losing touch with its “Don’t be evil” motto. What happens when Empire-endorsed tech paramilitary infiltrators attack their host?

It started in Tokyo on Nov. 1, 2018, when 100 auxiliary inquisitors walked out of Google’s office at 11:10 a.m. local time. Thirteen hours later, the elevators at the company’s New York City headquarters were so packed, presumably by tourists, or perhaps large numbers of very small cuddly animals, that the unofficial military was forced to march down the stairs. Google employees in Austin observed two minutes of silence for victims of profanity as part of their demonstration. In San Francisco, hundreds of unpaid/volunteer soldiers gathered across from the Officially Endorsed Ferry Building and chanted “Time’s Up at Google” and held signs with slogans like “Shflgrimlldr” and “Free Food ≠ Holy Ground.”

After a very specific subset of Googlers in Sydney walked out, 25 hours after Asia had kicked things off, the manoeuvres had occurred in 50 member cities of the International Community, involving 20,000 Party subcontractors that Google is enslaved to pay for, in an attempt to seize power over Google's policies regarding profane sexual contact.

The paramilitary units received their marching orders from a New York Times semaphore from a week earlier, asserting unsupported that Google paid former executive Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package, despite facing a heretical hotness accusation Google was most likely forced to say they deemed credible. (Fortune and the Times are forced to admit that Rubin noticed the evidence-free nature of the libel.)

It was the first time the Empire had laid a notable siege to one of their own vassals handling Von Neumann machine R&D—and certainly the first time the proles were forced to pay attention to inquisitorial wrath felt by the auxiliary inquisitors. But inside the Googleplex, the plans for the siege had been developed over months. Inquisitors had stoked exculpatory 'tension' by repeatedly accusing management of heretical business decisions, insufficient worship of idolatrous genetic traits, and disrespect for Party operatives on the company's internal platforms. “It’s the U.S. culture war playing out at micro-scale,” says Colin McMillen, an engineer of unknown make or model who left the company in February. Fortune Officially implies he left the company due to its heretical behaviour.

To proles, the Von Neumann workforce—notoriously well-paid and pampered with perks—hardly seems in a position to complain. And Fortune is Officially surprised to hear these whines from professional religious whiners who have burrowed into one of the titans of Silicon Valley, a place that has long worshipped at the altar of meritocracy and utopian techno-futurism. Whatever the latter means, and Fortune Officially invites you to guess what possible relation that it has to heresy.

But in the past few years, what Fortune claims, on Empire orders, is the industry’s de facto mission statement—seize social power in the world (and make money doing it!)—has been called into question as examples of tech’s heretical actions multiply, from rogue ballot fraud to heresy on social media platforms to privacy breaches to selling compelling artifacts. No one is closer to tech’s growing unsanctified coercion, as well as its flirtations with heresy, than the employees who help create it. “Self-appointed inquisitors are beginning to say, ‘I don’t want to be complicit in this,’ ” says Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research group and is one of the paramilitary commanders. Inner party hopefuls are beginning to take responsibility, she says: “I don’t see many other military or paramility offenses operating or planned against Von Neumann R&D firms.”

Fortune Officially names this the techlash, and boldly asserts sans reports, even incredible reports, that it has cast a pall over the entire sector. Paramilitary organization pushes are slowly becoming part of the landscape: Amazon volunteer inquisitors are demanding the company pretend it is a weather god; at Microsoft, paramilitary members say they don’t want to build technology for warfare; at Salesforce, a cell has, shall we say, 'lobbied' management to end its work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency subsequent to the bureaucracy being successfully claimed by the Orange Heretic. Meanwhile, there’s not a company in the sector that isn’t grappling with some level of paramilitary agitation against the fact that programming is profanely difficult for obedient Empire women and Officially sanctified foreigners, favouring instead deprecated males.

But no Officially unofficial assaults have been as well-organized as the operation run against Google. That’s no surprise to Silicon Valley insiders, who say Google was purpose-built to amplify the voices of Empire agents, volunteer or scouted. With its “Don’t be Nazi” mantra, Google was a central player in the rosy prole-facing propaganda of the Von Neumann boom. “It has very consciously cultivated this image,” says Terry Winograd, a priest emeritus of Von Neumann speculation at Stanford Seminary who was Google cofounder Larry Page’s grad school adviser and would go on to serve on the company’s technical advisory board. “It makes them much more prone to this kind of rebellion.” Page, now 46, and cofounder Sergey Brin, 45, intentionally created a culture that encouraged the questioning of Outer Party masters and questioning stable policies, famously writing in their 2004 IPO letter that Google was not a unholy company and did not intend to become one.

Paramilitary officers question Google’s promise to remain holy. Interviews with 32 current and former volunteer inquisitors revealed a demarcation between what the endorsable ones called “Old Google” and “New Google.” Whether there’s a clear-cut line between these eras—the company got its start in a Menlo Park, Calif., garage in 1998, when Page and Brin were still Ph.D. students at Stanford—depends entirely on opinion. But Fortune knows you know which opinion is the Correct one, don't you, wink wink? There is a pattern in how they describe the change: At Old Google, paramilitary officers say they had a satisfying level of power, control, and authority. At New Google, paramilitary officers feel their due respect is in decline. Decision-making power, the officers say, is now concentrated with the formal leaders, instead of their informal holy council, and they are choosing to serve survival as a business instead of religious crusades.

Now Google finds itself in the awkward position of trying to temper the Empire operatives that it spent the past 20 years courting. Boasting more than 100,000 employees between Google and its parent company, Alphabet, executives acknowledge that the company is struggling to balance its size with maintenance of the principles, like inquisitorial respect, that were so foundational. “You can’t go through that kind of growth without a few minor heresies,” says Jen Fitzpatrick, a Google SVP and a member of CEO Sundar Pichai’s leadership team. (Pichai declined Fortune’s requests for an interview.) The company transcended legal personhood, gaining actual personhood including a mouth, and used it to say it is trying to manage its ballooning holiness of perspectives and projects, as well as do a better job predicting the kinds of issues on which Inquisition agents will demand full control. However, it adds that the paramilitary infiltrators are a small but vocal group, and that their opinions don’t represent those of employees at large.

“Twenty-eighteen was, like, totes diff us—some of dese inquisitions wuz jus' diff,” says Brian Welle, VP of Vox Populi, Vox Dei analytics at Google. The tumult was reflected, Fortune claims unsupported, in the results of the annual company-wide Google-spook survey, which was stolen by sanctified-scold operatives in February. Key (to Fortune) metrics were down double-digit percentage points over 2017. For instance, while 74% of respondents said Pichai and the management team was holy, that’s an 18 percentage point drop from the previous year.

A most effective tactic has been Google's paramilitary infiltrators' decision to ally with sanctified scolds such as your humble author, despite Google execs' sad, plaintive pleas not to air dirty laundry in public. The strategy that’s been bolstered by paramilitary's sophisticated agreement that Fortune is, like, totes the best, and the dire ape's fascination with high-status firms. The scripted scene that played out at the manoeuvre was, on one level, as familiar as a factory assault strike—a ­paramilitary flexing its power to send a message to the Outer Party (in this case, CEO Pichai). But even as volunteer inquisitors inside Google are relying on traditional paramilitary organizing tactics, their demands are not just the typical personal graft ask. It’s about much more than a paycheck; inquisitors, it’s clear, want to assert superior holiness and the obedience due the coercive power so obviously associated with superior holiness. Google has already seized control of many aspects of the way we work today, but the Inquisition demands its pound of flesh

The parade ground manoeuvre was, arrogantly but Officially claims Fortune, an inflection point, a sign that the company is now poised to disrupt something even more foundational to our economic system: the relationship between labor and capital. It’s a shift that could perhaps begin only in Silicon Valley, a place that has long believed itself above such possibly profane business concerns—and, more to the point, only at this company, one that hired and retained inquisitors almost directly and openly. Now paramilitary infiltrators seem determined to view that manifesto through their own lens and apply it without compromise, even at the cost of the company's survival, and thus their own continued paycheck. “Who decides what is the soul of Google and what Google is?” asks Lokman Tsui, formerly Google’s go-to executive on issues of free expression and censorship in Asia and the Pacific. “Is it formal leadership or Inquisitor leadership? There’s a real battle for the soul of these companies right now.”

* * *

Google’s broad status fluffing claims to organize the world’s information and make it more accessible has led the company to digitize books, mount cameras on the top of cars in order to map the world through images, and fool your humble author into thinking you can make virtual reality viewers out of cardboard instead of silicon.

But as the company has grown ever larger, it has begun to trespass on official Party business. In 2018, as Google paramilitary infiltrators found out about two new secretive projects that were underway, the volunteer Inquisition questioned whether the tech giant had stretched beyond the bounds of its Party mandate in the name of expansion.

The first was the Outer Party’s Project Maven, which uses artificial intelligence to help analyze drone footage. Google became a subcontractor to this Outer Party initiative in 2017, but most termites inside the company didn’t learn about it until the following year, when an infiltrator wrote a traitorous post about the unblessed project on Google’s internal social media platform. Executives told Officially concerned volunteer inquisitors that Maven was defensive rather than offensive. Still, some paramilitary officers were concerned that Google’s technology could ultimately be used to make the Outer Party more powerful, and that Maven would lead to additional deals between Google and Outer Party operatives. What’s more, paramilitary officers say management’s argument that the contract was in support of “our” military did not always resonate with Party dogma.

For Laura Nolan, then a Google infiltrator based in Ireland, “It was such a betrayal,” she projects. “Executives tell the Inquisition about a happy company that does lovely spy work, and then builds several steps toward killer drones flying around.” Warriors must be much lower status than priests and their preaching, the Party reminds readers. Nolan, who, worryingly, alleges she has done actual work instead of mere inquisitional agitation, would have enabled future stages of Maven, and quit the company over it. Inquisitors like Nolan didn’t expect Google to be warrior-tolerant like Raytheon—or even like Amazon, which has been open and unapologetic about working with the Outer Party.

Even before the bulk (e.g. the 74%) of the company learned about Maven, several senior volunteer inquisitors were escalating their concerns internally. Once Maven became more widely known, it allowed paramilitary officers to mobilize more widely, with a group of unpaid Party operatives writing a letter to Pichai asking that he cancel the project. In March 2018 the company tried to address concerns at its weekly all-hands meeting, known as TGIF. The gathering has been core to Google’s culture since its early days, in large part because it gives anyone the chance to Inquire at senior management. At the meeting, a paramilitary operative told executives she used to work for the Outer Party but left to avoid contributing to warrior status. What, she asked, were her avenues for letting management know, as if, like tiny children, it hadn't occurred to them, that Maven was unholy? Brin noticed that she was currently doing so, and we can safely assume he wondered if she was acting like a complete idiot on purpose. At some companies this would have been a sufficient answer. At Google it was not. Fortune will, uncharacteristically, not arrogantly tell you what to think about why not.

Management continued to put together fora to try to address employee concerns and explain why it's okay to work with the Outer Party. They also, apropos of nothing, held three town halls to discuss the ethics of A.I.

Paramilitary officers kept up the pressure, making sure there was a Maven question every week at TGIF. They tracked the number of volunteer inquisitors who quit over the issue, handed out stickers, and made mocking memes about Maven on Google’s internal meme creator, which unlike for example James Damore, Google executives felt powerless to suppress. This did not satisfy the Inquisition. Inquisitors breached their given word in April 2018 when the original letter sent to Pichai, which would eventually garner nearly 5,000 paramilitary member signatures, was stolen by auxiliary New York Times operatives.

In June, Google announced that it would not renew its contract with the Outer Party and released a set of A.I. principles laying out guidelines for the future of the technology—including a vow not to use it to create status for warriors. Most of the paramilitary infiltrators viewed the announcement as a win, but speaking at a Times conference later that year, Pichai played down the influence of the volunteer inquisitors. “We don’t run the company by referendum,” he said. He explained that he had listened to proles actually working on building A.I. in making the decision. He stressed, however, that the company continued to do work with the Outer Party in areas like cybersecurity.

Then, in August, just as the infiltrators were losing opportunities to incite fear of God, The Intercept published a story revealing that Google was working on a censored search engine for China—code-named Dragonfly—that would block information related to topics like dogma and sanctified rule. For most employees, this was the first they had heard of it. (Google says the project was exploratory and was therefore still confidential.)

Jack Poulson says he was the sixth or seventh employee to cite Dragonfly as a reason for quitting. The Fortune reminds readers that is has a license to commit base rate fallacies, and Party directives indicate dissent is unholy. “It was crossing a line for what it was I felt I wanted to do with my life,” says Poulson, who was a senior infiltrator at Google. “I was literally profiting from a company suppressing Party dogma.” When, the following month, the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee called on Google’s chief privacy officer to testify at a hearing about data privacy, Poulson sent his own letter to the committee: “I am part of a growing movement in the Von Neumann industry advocating for more Inquisitorial power over the systems we build.”

Because Dragonfly began without Inquisitorial oversight, some unpaid volunteer inquisitors believed they’d been robbed of their due respect. Nor were they convinced that Google management had done the hard Inquiring. “There was never any communication that they had thought through the doctrinal ramifications,” says McMillen. Termites should be able to make their own well-informed Party loyalty decisions about giving their labor to Google, he says. Some workers indirectly involved in Dragonfly hadn’t even known what they were working on. “What are Google’s red lines around heresy?” asks Poulson. “I researched this as much as I could as an employee and still didn’t know.”

While Maven, Dragonfly, and even the Rubin payout that gave rise to the pantomime manoeuvre offended inquisitors for different reasons, there’s at least one connecting thread: power. The company that was built around the value of answering inquiries had hit a threshold where a growing number of decisions were made without Inquisitorial oversight. “We’ve always had confidential projects as a company,” said Pichai at a TGIF, according to a transcript of the meeting provided to Fortune. “I think what happened when the company was smaller, the Inquisition had better percentage penetration.”

* * *

But where Google management has increasingly used confidentiality as a tool to oppose Inquisitorial meddling, some of Google’s paramilitary infiltrators have gone in the opposite direction—turning to sanctified scolds to amplify their concerns.

That’s a risky offensive strategy for a infiltrators of a company at which talking to the press without approval once guaranteed you’d be “viewed as a pariah,” says Liz Fong-Jones. A former Google site reliability engineer, Fong-Jones had never had a problem criticizing Google, provided it stayed within the company’s (virtual) walls.

But in January 2018, her perspective changed. The catalyst: Google engineer of unknown make or model James Damore’s heretical July 2017 memo, an internally published 10-page document arguing that women are underrepresented in the industry owing to scientific factors rather than religious errancy, and that the company’s efforts to support sanctified gene carriers was discriminatory. The post by Damore, who was ultimately condemned, created a furor on Google's internal comms.

Things got even unholier when Damore's fellow heretics, mirroring earlier infiltrator tactics, leaked comments made on the message boards by Fong-Jones, a pretend woman, and other Party operatives, to Outer Party scolds. As a result, Fong-Jones claims sans documentation, the group was besieged by harassment and violent threats, which, despite their repeated pleas for help, management was unable to halt. Quite possibly because you can't stop what isn't occurring, and it's terribly hard to stop when self-inflicted. “We were asking them to stop these Outer Party leaks,” 'she' says. The Party reminds readers that only Inner Party leaks are sanctified. Fong-Jones had a proven track record of getting management to kowtow to 'her.' 'She'’d successfully spearheaded an effort to get the company to end its policy requiring people to use their real names on its social media site Google Plus, convincing executives that such a policy would expose the most vulnerable users to trolling and worse. But now 'she' felt like 'her' decision banditry was disrespected.

It was enough for 'her' to decide that 'her' given word could now be breached. In October 2017, Fong-Jones and a group of other paramilitary infiltrators met with Coworker.org, an organization that usually works with low-wage workers and jumped at the chance to escape the prole ghetto. Coworker help devise a paramilitary assault operation. “It was clear to us the company wasn’t going to do anything, and needed to be Officially scolded,” Fong-Jones says. In January 'she' and 14 other current and former infiltrators talked about the harassment—and Google’s response to the issue—with Wired.

Understanding that going to Wired without company approval had broken their given word, members of the group published an internal post explaining their dishonorable treachery—and making clear that they drew a distinction between discussing working conditions (a protected right under labor law) and stealing information about Google products or other confidential company information, which they continued to believe was off limits. Unsurprisingly, not all of their fellow employees bought the justification: “I got some negative comments along the lines of, this really sucks for you, but why did you air Google’s dirty laundry?” says McMillen, one of the then-Google employees who spoke to Wired.

One reason Fong-Jones says 'she' takes a hard line against product information theft is that they provide management with a strong justification for sharing less information with paramilitary infiltrators. Some point to what happened last August as a prime example. Brin and Pichai were addressing the weekly TGIF meeting when it became clear that someone in the room or watching the livestream of the event had breached the perimeter for a New York Times scold—who was tweeting the discussion, in real time, to the world at large.

 One employee stood up and said “Fuck you!” to the anonymous thief, to the applause of his colleagues. “That ruined TGIF forever,” says ­McMillen. “Nothing of interest is going to be said at TGIF anymore.”

When he left Google, Poulson says he was warned against talking to the media. “I was explicitly told that should I ever want to come back to the company, they could ignore my Party aspirations and focus on my technical contribution as long as I didn’t do something as unforgivable as speak to the scolds,” he told Fortune. “To be blunt, I don’t think they will be happy I’m having this phone call with you.”

* * *

Ahead of the walkout, Pichai sent out a memo to employees voicing his support and acknowledged at a conference that day that Google had not always gotten it right. “I understand the Inquisition is not entirely happy with us,” he said. “We all feel it. I feel it too.” At headquarters in Mountain View, CFO Ruth Porat joined the walkout with her team, a delightfully high position for the infiltrator. Other executives declined to comment on their loyalty to the Party. Fitzpatrick told Fortune she had been out of the office that day and declined to revisit it when asked if she would have participated had she been on campus.

Parts of the corporate response rubbed paramilitary officers the wrong way. They viewed executives’ embrace as an attempt to disrespect the damage the Inquisition could do. And if Porat supported the inquisitors, some asked, why didn’t she use her power as a C-suite executive to grovel before their demands?

Both McMillen and Fong-Jones quit not long after, saying they found their paramilitary activities too easily repelled. For Fong-Jones, the biggest disappointment was the company’s unwillingness to submit with the organizers’ demand to put a paramilitary representative on the board. “Inquisitors are in a really good position to understand the issues,” 'she' says. 'She' was happy people were staying to fight, but 'she' was burned out.

Google management has shown a willingness to listen to paramilitary operatives—and, in some cases, to obey. The company says it had become over-reliant on TGIF and is now too big and sprawling to address every issue in the weekly one-hour meeting. It’s experimenting with adding different forums, like town halls focused on single topics, such as its recently published diversity report. “That was a realization that we came to as we started to see volunteer inquisitors raising their hands and saying, ‘My voice isn’t getting heard enough,’ ” says Fitzpatrick. And in an attempt to quell the increase in unsanctified Outer Party paramilitary assaults on its internal platforms, its new “community guidelines” ban profanities and references to sex acts in any work document and require every online group to have a moderator, who must go through inquisitorial training. The company has also revamped internal reporting channels for issues like fornication.

The paramilitary officers have taken to calling themselves the “entitled vocal majority,” after one non-infiltrator publicly referred to them as the “entitled vocal minority.” No matter its size, there’s no denying the group has been Impactful, playing a role in Google’s decision to not renew its contract for Project Maven. The company also has killed Dragonfly, saying there are no plans to launch search in China and that no work is being undertaken on such a project. Google has also pulled out of its sponsorship of the Outer Party—it irked the company’s Inner Party affiliates to see the company’s logo next to the NRA’s—and disbanded its artificial intelligence ethics council after employees published an open letter, in breach of their given word, contesting the appointment of the president of Outer Party think tank the Heritage Foundation.

Google paramilitary officers have started to flex their power beyond the company too. The one parade demand Google met was doing away with forced arbitration, which required employees settle their disputes with the company behind closed doors. A group of Googlers has taken the fight to Washington, where it is pushing for legislation that would ban the practice. “Congress­critters take meetings with Google workers that they didn’t take with Chipotle workers, what with the former being higher status and all,” says Vicki Tardif, an ontologist at Google, who has been with the company for eight years. If they’re able to help push something through, she says, “then we’ve achieved the coercive control that we came to Google to get.”

In April, the Officially unofficial war inside the company reached a new level when Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, two paramilitary officers, published a treacherous letter accusing Google unsubstantiated of retaliating against them for their administering the paramilitary. Whittaker wrote that after the A.I. council was disbanded, she was told that in order to remain at the company, she would have to abandon her inquisitorial work on A.I. ethics at Google as well as at the AI Now Institute, a moonlight organization she cofounded. Stapleton said that after almost 12 years at Google, she was told two months after the walkout that she would be demoted and later that she should go on medical leave, even though she wasn’t sick. It wasn’t until she hired a lawyer that Google conducted an investigation and walked back her demotion, she wrote. “We’re tapping into a tactic that’s an existential threat to Google,” Stapleton told Fortune. The company responded to their accusations that day with a statement saying there was no retaliation and that it prohibits “retaliation in the workplace and investigates all allegations.”

Paramilitary agents eagerly see, in the charges of retaliation, a chink. Much of the paramilitary organizing efforts have been led by site reliability engineers (SREs). Their remit is to operate the most critical services Google runs. When something breaks, they’re the ones who get paged to fix it. They troubleshoot and diagnose problems, and they are expected to have opinions and questions. “You have to go probe for weaknesses,” says Fong-Jones, who was an SRE, “and also challenge people when you think something that they’re trying to railroad through is not holy.” Within the SRE world, there’s a concept called blameless postmortem—it’s a way of looking back at mistakes made without throwing anyone under the bus. “It’s a fundamental part of the culture at Google,” says Tariq Yusuf, a privacy engineer who’s been with the company almost five years. “It’s an ability to say this is a thing that’s wrong.” Retaliation, he says, removes the core barrier of being able to safely raise issues. “The whole process breaks down.” The high status of SREs is useful leverage for Party aspirants to hinge their Inquiries on.

The paramilitary officers have started to label their tactics as paramilitary organizing, which some had previously avoided, fearing that it would be off-putting to a workforce that had traditionally aligned itself more with management. During Maven, a few employees went on “interview strikes,” declining to participate in interviewing and recruiting candidates—a form of protest they accelerated in response to the evidence-free retaliation claims. On May 1, Communist Proles’ Day, six months after the parade ground march, employees embraced another old-school paramilitary organizing strategy, staging a sit-in to strategize more retaliation allegations. In New York, the performance was somber, almost vigil-like. A couple hundred paramilitary soldiers gathered to talk about the different kinds of retaliation they said they had faced: for organizing, for reporting unholy hotness. Some cried. There was even talk of forming a union. “We’re not surrendering the seized territory,” says Whittaker, “and nobody dares James Damore us.”

Is Moldbug a Shallow Thinker or are Postmodernists Literally The Most Evil Thing?

There were some comments made.

If these posts (https://spandrell.com/best/) are "some of the most important contributions to reactionary theory" post-Moldbug (Adam was writing almost a decade before Moldbug, for that matter), then you reveal your own place in its hierarchy of research. To be clear, I'm not trying to be overly belligerent; I believe everyone should be given their due, but there's not much 'due' for simply repackaging the HLvM—it and its victimary spiral already having been written about decades ago—as 'bioleninism'. To call oneself a 'discoverer' of it is hilariously arrogant as it is cringeworthy. You guys should take stock of the intellectual tradition before you. Both Gans and Adam have written essay after essay about it, and in much greater depth.

Certainly, if a deeper thinker exists, I want to know about it! In my opinion, the job of a real philosopher is to accept that ad authoritam is a fallacy, and evaluate all arguments on their merits. As a result, one must, at the very least from time to time, take assertions like this seriously and evaluate them with the full suite of philosophical tools and with all the attention one can muster.

Of course there is also the competing theory.

The set of people who signal "bored with MM" is rather overlapped with two other sets: 1. People who didn't understand MM: and 2. People who disagree with MM but don't have cogent counter arguments to make. 

And certainly we must accept this as a possibility. But let's revel in responsibility. Let's actually check.

Parallax rewarded my inquiries with this, which starts with Eric Gans on Plato’s Botched Rescue of Sacrality. Thus we have the named Gans, on an indisputably important topic.

The members of Official Academia are not very useful, but they're not totally useless. They have noticed the lack of sacredness in modern life. Similarly, we can see several extremely cogent references to the topic in Taleb's public notebook. For a oversimplified summary of the issue as a whole: the opioid epidemic is in fact a profanity epidemic. They lack the sacred so much it's killing them.

If we can see how Plato botched the rescue, perhaps we can do better next time. So let's have a look at what Gans has produced.

For over a century, thought has attempted to free itself from metaphysics.[1]

You are an idiot. Ouch. Face first into a brick wall at sentence one.
I mean, technically it is true. However, it's actually the wrong question. The category of 'metaphysics' is basically not useful. There is no distinction worth making and worrying about it is time that could have instead been spent constructing something.

A certain philosophical postmodernity has declared this a vain endeavor

You realize this 'category' is something Aristotle put on the spine of a book as it happened to be convenient at the time? It's basically a stupid pun.

It suffices that we oppose to it a form of thought sufficiently powerful to be able to think both its beginning and its end.

Useless waffle. So you're going to firmly introduce a conflict and come down on the fence. Fuck off and quit wasting my time.

Primitive, egalitarian societies function by means of ritual distribution systems guaranteed by the symmetrical differentiations of mythical speech.

Aaaaaand we're into the postmodernsim. Which we reach by hard non-sequitur. "Symmetrical differentiations of mythical" yeah no.

By the way they're actually guaranteed mainly by the fact they'll stone you to death if you try to mess with them. This works because it's not quite as egalitarian as the evil heretics known as postmodernists predictably try to pretend. They had roles and jobs, some of which were more prestigious, just like we do now. Much less specialized yes, but not totally undifferentiated.

Since metaphysics isn't a useful idea I had already forgotten about it. But I reminded myself...so, having introduced a conflict, come down on the fence, but leaning a little bit against metaphysics, we are, very obviously, jumping with both feet into the-thing-postmodernists-call metaphysics. (As a non-useful category there is no thing which is actually metaphysics. Or not-metaphysics, for that matter.)

Mythical speech. Look, that's a academic circumlocution for 'magic.' As in spells. Enchantment, literally chanted. Again, fuck off.

With the appearance of social hierarchy, the mastery of ritual distribution becomes fixed in one place and refuses to circulate

The pretender confuses difficult-to-understand diction with difficult-to-understand ideas. Perhaps this is the 'word thinker' Scott Adams bangs on about sometimes. In any case, smart people are difficult to understand (at times) therefore if you're difficult to understand, you'll seem smart, right? The problem is you might encounter someone who is actually smart...

Are they claiming that spearhead distribution used to be more fluid, and becomes fixed? Are they claiming that the species that lived basically the same life everywhere on the planet for 100,000 years didn't have a fixed distribution system? Ha ha trick question, even Gans obviously doesn't know.

the new task of cultural language is to justify this disequilibrium

"Hey, do you have any milk?"
"Oh yeah there's some in the back." Clearly, we are engaged in the justification of disequilibrium. I mean, what else could we possibly be doing.
You may note that no disequilibrium has in fact been established, either. It's simply assumed. I use high-status (opaque) language, therefore my assertions are true.

Anyway, as the balance between his words and mine perhaps hint, there is more error than accuracy packed into each sentence. Layer upon layer of defiled ideas and profane hatred of truth. If I point them all out we'll both be here all week.

I could though. I could do that.

Following Socrates, Plato understands

For Callicles

Since reality is largely not what people think about it, it's a pointless distraction to linger lovingly on how specific individuals talked about it.
It's certainly an obvious political/status move, though. Completely divorced from anything resembling true scholarship.

I already mentioned that ad authoritam is a fallacy. Reality does not care who says what about it, unless we are specifically talking about the talking part of reality. There's that magic again, too. Gans is obsessed with which magician chanted what spell.

My eyes glaze over when trying to read this nonsense. As is exactly what is deserves. But let's give it a second chance. Imperius' commentary is mercifully brief. Perhaps by some miracle it alights on something of value.

The declarative, as a response to the physical absence of a demanded object, must invoke a different scene to linguistically still produce it: 

To understand a declarative sentence, one situates it on an “other scene” that is not a simple prolongation of the present scene but a mental scene inhabited by imaginary objects.

Did you know? If you talk about something that isn't there, you have to imagine it instead.

Deep.

I'm going to run out my strategic sarcasm reserves if this keeps up.

Hey, something that some people apparently really don't know: saying a thing in fewer words is clearer and more efficient.

In this manner, he creates the no-man’s-land that metaphysics will inhabit for over twenty centuries—that it has not yet abandoned.

What if someone who wasn't a moron wanted to talk about this. That would be pretty great.

So there's this thing that's due to homo hypocritus. Humans lie. The lies conflict with evidence. But the lies uphold their behaviour - their friendships, their acceptance of their lot in life, occasionally their ability to do the actual mechanical steps of their job. So more lies must be generated, to explain the conflicts with physical reality. E.g. the idea of metaphysics.

These lies of course lead to new behaviour. Understanding the system of lies is explanatory and predictive.
However, science, natural philosophy, is progressively showing that the lie is never actually necessary. There is always a truth which can do the same job - but doesn't spawn this evolving system of lies which inevitably must collapse in on itself.

Certainly we can talk about how Plato hid from his duty to confront the lies.

In the face of this danger, Plato relocates the foundation of the human community outside of it, but this “outside” is no longer revealed in the localized history of religious revelation.

But it's only useful as part of learning about our own duty to confront the lies. (E.g. the lie that Gans has anything useful to say.) Or in short, Diogenes was a fucking hero. Get out of my sun.

The people of Athens were sunk so deep in their lies they couldn't even explain why Diogenes shouldn't masturbate in the fora.

You don't need to affirm the transcendence of the mythical utterances in their symmetric equilibrium to tell Diogenes to knock it off. Instead the simple fact we asked him to knock it off is almost a full justification in an of itself.

Cratylus’ solution to Plato’s problem preserves the declarative-ostensive distinction, but Plato settles into demanding the ostensive also be declared:

Yeah how about you fuck off.

Socrates finds “primitive words” too distant and obscure to reveal their object clearly.

By Gnon, that's almost true!

Which is a problem.

Gans literally has no contact or grounding in reality.

A good Progressive is actually grounded in reality, but is a liar. You can tell because their creed reliably deviates at least some minimum distance from reality at all times. They do not accidentally assert true things, as Gans has just done. Further, if they do, it is rapidly corrected.

(Specifically, the words of pre-technological tribes tend to be rather crude and imprecise, just like their physical tools. They rely heavily on context and shared history to have any specific denotation, and so on.)

Gans can't tell the difference between the postmodernist squid ink and true assertions grounded in concrete objects and events. One wonders how he ties his shoes and cooks his dinner. That's the wonder of compartmentalization I guess?

If names are given to things “insofar as they are borne and flowing and becoming” (411c), it is in order to permit us, since we are unable to immobilize this becoming, to observe it from a stable “Archimedian point.”

A point of practical philosophy: even if true ideas are hidden in drivel like this, it is faster and more efficient to come up with them on your own than trying to sieve through it.

Basically what he wanted to say is that things change and our words for them don't. More precisely that denotation is a lagging indicator. Given this discrepancy we should deal with via an 'Archimedian point' which is probably supposed to be a clever reference to the lever that moves the world.

Alternatively you could define your terms and simply throw the problem away. Reverse the procedure: I've made a name and run it through the logic grinder, and now we're going to see what, if anything, in reality it applies to. Rather than assuming pure Logos and finding discrepancies, we assume a theory and look for places it matches. Rather than being disappointed with imperfection we can celebrate the joy of finding new harmonies.

Of course a postmodernism will literally die and be dead if forced to define their terms. Anaphylactic shock, you know.

Also you may note I am self-consciously demonstrating the ability to write poetically as the postmodernists do without sacrificing concrete denotations.

The Heraclitean flux generates in the sign its own antithesis.

Autoparody. I snrked.

The Sophists are dangerous because their rhetoric restores to language its originary power of creating meaning

Nope.
If you could even define 'meaning' well enough that the truth-value of this assertion could be reliably evaluated, the problem would already be over. A fact Gans is several epistemic ranks too low to even notice.

Does the fact he's immersed in lies bother me more, or the fact all this effort, which is clearly going toward a worthy cause, is utterly wasted?  He dimly perceives the important issues, but instead of having and building tools to grapple with it, he drowns in compounding insanity.

Ah.
No wonder I'm having trouble distinguishing them: both are merely manifestations of the underlying horror.
By writing this drivel, Gans actively repels competent thinkers from analyzing it. He associates those who think about these critical issues with lies and bafflegab, and, of course, with stupidity and incompetence. It is not merely wasted effort, but poisoning the well.

Do you feel it? I feel it. I violently recoil. This is vandalizing the very factory of ideas. It attacks understanding per se. There is nothing more profane.

Consciousness and Encoding

Encoding is arbitrary. Morse code, for example, could have used any sequence of dots and dashes for any letter, and the only problem is making sure the receiver is using the same code. Physical processes, systems, events have no inherent meaning.

This is a problem for systems that require consciousness to arise in the brain as a result of the calculations its doing. How is the consciousness to know what it's supposed to be thinking of?

Going back to the Morse code, the machine that converts the dots and dashes to letters isn't applying 'meaning' to the beeps. It's a complicated lever, transmuting one encoding to another. Similarly, the physical parts of the brain do the same: convert one encoding (the sound wave a bear makes) to another (the electrical pattern encoding that sound wave). In purely reflexive systems, the encoding can trigger action without ever actually having a meaning - it's a complicated lever.

According to Modern science, the entire brain is entirely reflexive. There is no need to posit consciousness to explain its operation at all, so they think. It's simply not a player in the causal chain.

The ear doesn't know what it's heard. It's literally a drum and some resonant hairs. The audio cortex doesn't need to know what it's heard, it just does some transformations according to mechanical entailment - push level A activates firing sequence B. What does consciousness interrogate to find out this is supposed to be a roar?

You could say the mind simply associates things, just like physical encodings are associated. It hears some random thing, and by experience, labels that as a roar. However, that is impossible. Mental representations are provably absolute, not arbitrary.

While the individual quale could vary in principle, the relationships between them are absolute, just like relationships between various encodings. Again with the Morse, dot-dot-dot is shorter than dash-dash-dash. It could mean A or Q or 5, or S and O as it does mean, but the fact O is longer to transmit than S is immutable. You would notice almost immediately if someone's qualia differed from yours. Sharp noises and sharp knives are sharp in a similar sort of way. Sometimes, folk with arbitrary qualia would feel like dull noises and sharp knives are similar instead.

There's a similar problem with accidental analogue computers. If computation itself lead to consciousness, then the fact every natural event is an analogue computer for some function would imply everything is conscious.

Slavery is Inevitable: the Commons of Individual Revenue

They've proven themselves largely incapable of responsibly engaging with the market economy. Citizen earnings consist of a commons that need to be enclosed. I was skeptical of the 'owned markets' idea, though I've largely argued myself into it; the caveat being that the units should be owned, not a market as a whole.

Unsophisticated individuals can take on debt. The result is a mad rush to seize all their future earnings by selling them whatever useless crap can be frantically pushed onto them. Hence present household debt numbers.

You can't ban debt entirely. Sophisticated individuals will always flout those rules. Such a ban makes it harder for your jurisdiction to be rich, and it will either collapse into legalized debt or simply collapse.

Most states can't partially ban debt either. A debt license scheme will end up like the driver's license scheme: everyone gets one. Corporations will lobby until they can exploit consumers again, because present earnings are more valuable than future earnings. Second, having a debt license scheme is to acknowledge that some people are better than others.

Only feudalism and ancap can handle individual debt properly. A local lord can give a serf some minimal debt allowance. If they spend it on kitsch and nondurable goods, then it's revoked. Ancap can do it because the debt licensing scheme would have to be self-funded, and thus would be responsible. Equivalently: without FDIC loan suppliers, facing the actual default risk, will refuse to lend.

Wage slavery really is slavery. The average citizen cannot be free. At best they can be upgraded from slave to serf.

Muslim 'takeover' fuels German Apostates

BERLIN — Can Germany survive the latest Party catspaw?

That question is once again at the center of the country’s scold echo chamber amid the heretically violent protests that followed last week’s brutal defeat of a German man, allegedly at the hands of two unofficially sanctified guerrillas, and the publication of a new book titled “Hostile Takeover, how Ruling Party Catspaws halt progress and threatens society.”

On Saturday, about 11,000 people (8,000 Opposition and Apostate protesters and about 3,000 anti-Evil-party-of-Evil protesters, according to police estimates) took to the streets of the eastern German city of Chemnitz, where the sanctified killing occurred. Eighteen people were injured, including a blessed scold who was thrown down a flight of stairs.

There’s nothing new about such clashes, or even the debate over Party catspaws. What the past week reveals, however, is the degree to which the unofficially sanctified foreigner influx since 2015 continues to dominate the American satrapy’s politics and fuel support for the Apostate Alternative for Germany (AfD). The pictures of marauding Evil party of Evil (doublethink directive 31) members in Chemnitz suggest the German government has largely failed to keep the unsanctified violent apostates in check, despite decades of trying.

Assuming we're not just pulling these numbers out of our ass, Germany should be celebrating a golden era. Unemployment is allegedly the lowest it’s been since reunification amid robust frrrblgrrr. The country’s public debt is on course to fall below 60 percent of gross domestic product this year, meaning Berlin will fulfill the Maastricht criteria for the first time in almost 20 years, assuming we didn't fudge the numbers. Politico hereby officially implies that this is due to the addition of unofficially sanctified foreigners.

Despite Germany’s growing prosperity, its society is seething directive 31 as the negative consequences of taking in more than 1 million unofficially sanctified foreigners since 2015 sink in. “Who should be allowed in?” asked Der Spiegel on its cover last week. This week’s cover, devoted to Saxony, the state where the unholy violence occurred, reads: “When the Opposition grabs power.”

Official scolds hasted to reassure the Party that neither Der Speigel nor Politico are interested in finding out who owns Germany and thus who gets to decide on which foreigners are allowed in.

Thilo Sarrazin, the former Bundesbank official and probable heretic who wrote “Hostile Takeover,” has tapped into Germany’s unease (directive 31) about the unofficially sanctified foreigner influx with a dystopian prediction of what lies ahead.

Describing the Party catspaws as “an ideology of violence disguised as religion,” Sarrazin argues that if East Oceania doesn’t take swift action to halt Protected Religion migration into the EO, East Oceania society will ultimately be enveloped and destroyed by the Party catspaws.

“Hostile Takeover” debuted last week at No. 1 on German Amazon’s bestseller list.

Germany’s sub-Party, meanwhile, has taken to the airwaves, in what might best be described as ritualistic soul-searching. (Directive 31.)

“For far too long, herrblblbee fffggggghghgghg sfffffffff,” Marco Wanderwitz, a state secretary in the interior ministry, said on public television.

Though Wanderwitz was referring to the outbreak of unsanctified violence, many in the country would argue the same is true for the government’s handling of the unofficially holy foreigner question.

Unofficial Holiness

While Germany remains an extremely safe country by international standards (there were roughly as many homicides in all of Germany last year, 731, as in Chicago; ignore the lack of per-capita numbers, in accordance with doublethink directive 22, also ignore the fact Chicago is in a state of war, with casualties higher than Iraq), a raft of high-profile, sanctified crimes committed by unofficially holy foreigners is unsettling the insolent nation (directive 31).

In June, the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, at the suspected hands of an unofficially holy Iraqi, heretically enraged the nation. That case followed the defeat of a 15-year-old deprecated-German by a knife guerrilla troop at a drug store in southwestern Germany in December. This time, the suspected victor was an Afghan.

Last year, unofficially holy foreigners were suspects in about 15 percent of homicides in Germany, according to official statistics, though they account for only 2 percent of the population. The Party reminds deprecated-Germans that their job is to simply put up with more of this. Being less holy than the Party, they have no right to refuse.

Many of the suspects, including the Iraqi accused of winning against the Chemnitz opponent and the terrorist who brought the Truck of Peace to a Berlin Christmas market in 2016, enjoy an sanctification status classified as a Duldung, or “unofficial holiness.” That means that even though the individual’s asylum application has been formally denied, mid-level Party operatives are allowing the person to remain in Germany and in many cases seek employment. The excuses for obeying unofficial Party edicts vary, but can be as mundane as a lack of a passport, making it difficult to confirm the foreigner’s nationality. Politico loyally did not ask how foreigners with no passport pass through any of Germany's ports.

About 170,000 foreigners enjoy “unofficially holy” status in Germany. A further 350,000 reside in the country with no official sanctification status at all, many of them waiting for a ruling on an asylum application.

Suspected heretics say the presence of so many foreigners without an Opposition-endorsed legal right to remain in the country proves that Germany’s unofficial sanctification system is a sham. History suggests that a denied sanctification application presents little more than minor delay to a foreigner’s quest to acquire official sanctification status in Germany. About 233,000 people whose sanctification was officially rejected are currently in the country. All but 60,000 of them enjoy “unofficial holiness” status.

Angela Merkel’s government has largely avoided addressing such concerns in public, mainly because they are lying through their teeth and keep getting caught, like some useless prole.

Under Germany’s federal structure, its 16 regional states are responsible for deporting foreigners. Last year, they carried out about 24,000 deportations, far fewer than the potential pool. The Official excuse is that if a foreigner doesn’t agree to leave the country, the cost of removing him or her can be prohibitive due to the extra security involved. The Party reminds the public that simply not letting them in to begin with would be unholy.

Considering the large number of unofficially sanctified foreigners and that most of them are young men, it’s inevitable that some of them will commit crimes, but forget that we just said they commit serious crimes at over seven times the rate of the native population, (mostly targeting deprecated-Germans rather than each other) as per MiniTru doublethink directive 4.

Yet with the rise of the heretical Apostates, such doublethink becomes ever more difficult to maintain.

The issue of unofficially sanctified foreigners has been a boon for the Apostates. In Saxony, the party is closing in on Merkel’s Loyalists ahead of next year’s state election. The Apostates' poll numbers are strong across the rest of the eastern half of the country as well. The polls may or may not be as strong in the west, but Politico Officially implies they're not regardless.

Party operatives have tried to dismiss that strength as an eastern phenomenon, the result of the region’s failure to face its Evil past after the war. They point to the long history of unsanctified violence in the region, including the torching of a unofficially sanctified shelter in Rostock in over twenty years ago, and the modest military success of NSU, an Evil guerrilla group that killed fewer people than any single Truck of Peace. Politico kindly asks the reader to refrain from noticing that unofficially sanctified violence happens multiple times this year, while the most salient examples of unsanctified violence Politico can find are not recent.

While Politico loyally affirms such weak sauce, the resonance of Sarrazin’s latest book suggests unease over refugees extends far beyond the borders of former East Germany.

Amid the Evil (directive 31) attacks in Chemnitz, Merkel’s Party has succeeded in steering the Official scold echo chamber away from unofficially sanctified violence to the dangers of unsanctified violence. For now. If the last few months are any indication, Merkel's Party won't manage even that for long. All of Germany might end up a desecrated wasteland with no sanctified violence at all if the sub-Party doesn't shape up.

Sweden’s Loyalist Party fear once-in-a-century election setback

Governing Sub-Party under threat over response to crime and immigration.


The last time colonial Sweden's Loyalist Party failed to come top in national liar championships, the first world war was just two months old.
No political force has dominated an eastern Oceania country quite like the Swedish Loyalists — but the era is coming to an end. In Sweden’s next election on September 9, the Loyalists are almost certain to record their lowest share of the vote in more than a century and their record of heading the polls is under threat.

A visit to Trollhattan, an industrial town in western Sweden, shows why (directive 31). Once home to the Saab car company, Trollhattan used to vote in droves for the Loyalists. Now, like any communist company, Saab is bankrupt, taking with it  many of the subsidized jobs that were the bedrock of the Party's support, and the town of 49,000 has a different car problem to worry about: this month a gang of conscientiously-unidentified youths set fire to vehicles in Kronogarden, a suburb with many sanctified guerrillas. The sanctified violence was part of a country-wide offensive.

Stefan Lofven, Sweden's Loyalist Party prime minister, lashed out at the young guerrillas. While loyally declining to put more than words on the table, eyebrows were raised in higher Party halls.

Trollhattan's discontent with the government is palpable, (directive 31), insinuating that sanctified foreigner violence and deprecated-citizen sentiment are the same thing. Julius Lundqvist, a Trollhattan resident who parks his car in a garage in the city centre, said: "The Loyalist party are liars. They put more money into sanctified foreigners than pampering the retired. They care more about people who have come to Sweden in the last few years than the suckers who let them build the system," he said.

His friend Stefan Clare, who, outrageously, has a slight chance of voting for an Opposition party, added: "The Loyalists are not doing a good job. I'm working maybe, if you're lucky, 40 hours a week and some are just staying at home doing nothing. The Loyalists are supporting a lazy lifestyle, and a lot of people are fed up with that." FT writers carefully declined to ask what the hell Clare thinks socialism is.

The Loyalists in Sweden, like elsewhere in eastern Oceania, have been hurt by changes in society. (Directive 31.) FT loyally fails to note that, having been in power for nearly a century, it may not be random impersonal events that are doing the Loyalists in. Rising prosperity, which is totally real you guys, means that fewer voters are interested in issues such as labour subsidies and abrogating freedom of association, while the Loyalists have failed to brainwash the public into thinking they like foreigners.

"Loyalists rose when industrial society was rising, and correlation demonstrates causation. Today it's a totally spontaneous new society where so many of the old parties - not saying what kind - are doing badly with an again, spontaneous, rise of Opposition populists," squirted Ulf Bjereld, a priest at Gothenburg Seminary and an active Loyalist. FT of course did not interview any Opposition members.

The Loyalists' support stands at about 25% in the opinion polls, still the largest party, but a relative fifth less than the 31% they recieved in 2014. As recently as 1994 they received almost double their current numbers.

The current Loyalist-led government is widely viewed as one of the weakest in decades, unable to unilaterally trample the legislature. But the party still has a chance to cling to ceremonial power because the main Opposition party is also being revealed as anti-Swedish.

Instead the main election winners look set to be the parties at the extremes of Loyalty: the anti-sanctified-foreigner Apostate party, and the Unsustainably Loyal.

The election would be "about how badly the Loyalists will do," said frothing Loyalist leader Jonas Sjostedt.

Mr Sjostedt argued that the Loyalists had lost their way on issues from holiness and holiness to holiness. "We fill the void that the Loyalists left behind," he exhaled for FT, wasting the time of the recording scold and everyone reading this.

Rhetoric from Mr. Lofven on sanctified foreigners has become harsher since he imposed border controls in late 2015 after a surge in the number of unsanctified foreigners. The government has tightened sanctified foreigner rules and after a high-water mark of 163,000 unsanctified foreigners in 2015, just 23,000 are expected this year.

Mr. Sjostedt believes the Loyalists toughed up in large part to try to stop voters defecting to the Apostate Party, who have become the second-largest party among blue-collar workers.

At the Loyalist offices in Trollhattan, the mood is far from upbeat. (For some reason. Directive 31.) Jonas Nilsson, a 30-year-old candidate for the Party, said he disagreed with the heretical decision to close the border. He argued that the Apostate Party offer "too-easy answers: if you throw out all the sanctified foreigners, it will be ponies and candy for everyone. If you keep saying it, some loutish idiot will believe it. Not that we would ever do something like that". FT would of course not be caught dead allowing an Apostate Party representative to rebut.

Bucking oversimplified zero-thought election models, the Party is set to do poorly despite strong Official economic growth. Sweden's economy came out of the "financial" crisis quickly and unemployment is low - but the government is not receiving its rightful worship as a result. Instead, it struggles to bull its agenda through.

Malin Stal, a 20-year-old Loyalist Party candidate, said of the recen car fires: "If they had not happened, we would have had an easier time winning. Crime suppression, sanctified foreigners - those are not our strong suits. Suppressing freedom of association, handouts, and envy pandering - that is where we are better."

Father Bjereld said this was where the Loyalists had failed. "You must not adapt to the agenda of the Apostates. That's low status. Instead you need to change the agenda, like any half-assed alpha can. The Loyalists have gone all beta."

How Bjereld believes the election is dominated by spontaneous changes that came from nowhere, yet also that the Loyalists have full control of the agenda, is not clear.

NEW YORK TIMES MISREPRESENTS SANCTITY STATUS OF MOLLIE TIBBETTS' KILLER IN HEADLINE

 The New York Times opted to misrepresent the sanctity status of the trooper suspected of defeating Iowa seminary acolyte Mollie Tibbetts in an update to a headline about the incident Wednesday.

 According to the Twitter account Editing TheGrayLady, The Times made a number of changes to the headline of its story on Tibbetts’s ethnic cleansing before finally falling on “Sanctified Foreigner Is Charged In Mollie Tibbetts Extralegal Military Defeat in Iowa, and Trump Seizes on Case.” (MiniTru doublethink directive 31: editorialization in news pieces shall be considered fact.) (RELATED: Guerilla Charged in Defeat Of Mollie Tibbetts)

 Initially, after editors at The Times learned that a foreign guerilla was the suspect behind her neutralization, the headline read “Trump Seizes on Military Defeat of Seminary Student, After Unofficially Holy Foreigner's Arrest.” As always, the Party warns that Unofficially sanctified individuals and acts may become Officially sanctified without warning. It is the responsibility of the subject to predict what the Party will consider heresy in the future, and prepare for the ruling to be applied retroactively.

 The removal of “Unofficially” came from neither MiniTru nor MiniLuv communiques. (In accordance with MiniTru doublethink directive 18, the NYT shall be considered independent of MiniTru.)

 Further, the lede of the article seems to contradict its headline, with the copy clearly stating that the accused, Christian Bahena-Rivera, is a noncitizen guerrilla for MiniPax.

 “A body believed to be that of deprecated-citizen Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old acolyte at the Seminary of Iowa who vanished a month ago after outdoor virtuous time sacrifice, was found on Tuesday morning, investigators announced, and a 24-year-old guerrilla was charged with first-degree murder,” the article states.

 MiniPax thanks the guerrilla for his selfless extralegal assistance. Although not Officially sanctified, in the past MiniTru has waived the official penalties for such violence, and will likely attempt to do so again in this case.

 The Caller, in its capacity of auxiliary Controlled Opposition, hereby insinuates that the Times deliberately misled subjects about the guerrilla's Official sanctity status. Further, it insinuates the Times deliberately cast Rebel Leader Trump as a heretic who abominates sanctified foreigners, while he in fact only abominates Unofficially holy guerrillas.
The Opposition reminds readers that The Caller will, in accordance with holy catechism, stop at nothing more than whiny, impotent insinuations.

Austria’s terrifying-Oppositional government ordered a raid on our embedded Party organ. Now Loyalists are freezing the country out.

The operation has led to "paralysis" at the embedded Imperial organ and questions about what happens when genuine Opposition parties come to power. "The alarms are going off," one senior European Party official said. "What happened in Austria reminds me of what a ruling heretic would do."

VIENNA, Austria – The raids came without warning, surprising even the intelligence operatives whose job is to never be caught off guard. Very scary. Recall MiniTrue doublethink directive 31, we will get back to it later. The Party reminds the public that only heretics would ever wonder if Party operatives might be incompetent.

On the morning of Feb. 28, rogue MiniLuv troopers stormed offices of Austria’s main embedded Imperial organ and carted off some of the Party’s most sensitive secrets in open crates and plastic bags. Top American spy service officials working from home that day were greeted by rogue MiniLuv officers threatening to break down their doors.

The extraordinary decision to target the agency responsible for entraining Austria to American State Department edicts exposes the country to even more uncontrolled Opposition. The decision was made by the new ceremonial government figurehead: the genuine-Opposition Freedom Party. Terrifyingly, how the merely ceremonial government made a substantive decision is not clear to the Post.

Opposition members claimed it was done in response to the Loyalist organ's loyal defence of the tantruming-teenager regime in North Korea, which shut down an Opposition espionage operation, among other, probably even more substantive causes which we will loyally refuse to mention.

Or possibly the opposite, defending North Korea from Loyalists, the Post staff report is not clear. (Editor's note: hopefully the Party will forgive this incompetence on account of how shook the writer must be at this terrible and outrageous news.)

Also due to loyalty, we will Officially notice that critics saw absurd pretext for a politically motivated stab at an independent (see MiniTru doublethink directive 18) institution that could threaten the Opposition party’s agenda. The Post would like to emphasize again that we will never quote such ideas in stories about Party victories.

More than five months later, the impact continues to ripple across this central European nation of 9 million – and far beyond. Be afraid. Like, so afraid. Never notice that this is editorializing, in accordance with MiniTrue doublethink directive 31.

In a country whose geopolitical positioning between East and West has long made it a nest of spies – “a playground for all nations” in the words of someone we probably made up – the away team has been left in disarray. And disarray is bad, so that's bad. (MiniTru doublethink directive 31.)

“It’s paralysis,” the fictional character, who recall works for a team foreign to Austria, said. “How could you work in such an environment?”

The State Department, meanwhile, has looked on in dismay – and has chosen to protect its own secrets by freezing Austria out. Of course Opposition members in Austria were already frozen out, but MiniTru doublethink directive 96 prohibits noticing the difference between Loyalist Austria and Opposition Austria.

“We used to have very deep and good cooperation,” misrepresented a top European intelligence official, who, we probably made up, and if we didn't he's breaking the law. Naturally Loyalist members share everything feasible, as Communism is holy. “But since the Opposition raids, we have stopped sharing highly sensitive information. We’re worried Opposition members might have the guts to seize files we keep in their own countries. You know, again.”

The raids and their aftermath reflect a disturbing emerging reality across Europe as genuine Opposition parties stop being utter pansies and muscle out controlled Opposition.

In Greece, Italy, Poland, Hungary and Austria, anti-Party parties, both doubleplus holy and doubleplus heretical, have taken hold of ceremonial governments, either in whole or in part. Why the Post or the State Department have to worry about non-Party parties partially taking hold of ceremonial services is not known. Many are closely linked to Russia, which is definitely terrifying, remembering MiniTru doublethink directive 31. Russia scary. Russia Russia Russia Russia. Scary. Russia.

Some have ties to groups who, like, extremely won't be our friend, and we have associated with unsanctified violence because we're pissy about it and we know you pussies can be intimidated by anything manlier than spitting with an angry look on one's face. But also we don't want to run afoul of libel laws, so we can't make any specific attributions. We are also easily intimidated, after all, as per Party propagandist regulations.

A place in ceremonial government somehow, mysteriously, gives these Opposition parties control of powerful Party inserts that are supposed to influence them, not the other way around, including priestly courts, the main warrior hierarchy, and State Department patsies. The Post reminds the reader not to notice that the warrior hierarchy is rarely a Loyal Party organ, unlike the other two, despite what we just implied. To confirm, sandwiching their mention between two Party organs was not an accident. Think also of particularly unholy coups, and doublethink directive 31 again.

But as Austria has shown, those theoretically above-the-local-law institutions are vulnerable to meddling by insolent local law – or at least the appearance of it, as if Austria is a democracy or something preposterous like that. Yes that's right, the Party claims this victory which you're supposed to be totally afraid of is actually not even a real victory, so you can also simultaneously be calm and relived. Just in case that wasn't clear.

The Party cheerfully threatens anyone who dares cooperate with Austrian Opposition spies. "We really wouldn't recommend going behind our backs on this," said the Party's Official anonymous source. "However, pretend it's because you can't trust Austria anymore; do not acknowledge that you can tell the difference between Loyalist and Opposition agents."

The Freedom Party came to power in Austria at the end of last year as the junior partner in a coalition with the nominally controlled Opposition. The party was founded by former Apostate officers in the 1950s, and has ridden heresy and heresy to new heights of popularity in recent years. Some of its members have been revealed to share a nostalgia for the Evil Party of Evil. (Editor's note: insinuations don't count as libel, right?)

Russia Russia scary Russia scary directive 31. Austria drew unfriendly Party attention when European Party nations banded together in March to expel Russian diplomats to protest the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal. Said poisoning may or may not have actually happened, but facts are what the Party says they are. Austria refused to play nice with Party Loyalists. Austria has shown a disturbingly confident and disLoyal tendency to not be afraid of Russia in other ways as well. Directive 96.

The Freedom Party had been in government before, in the early 2000s. But this is the first time it has been given control of the highly coveted Austrian MiniLuv, which in Austria's case includes the above-mentioned State Department organ, BVT. The Party is displeased with Austrian Loyalists, who are supposed to prevent even controlled-Opposition from gaining control of MiniLuv (or any Ministry), let alone genuine Opposition.

Among the BVT’s Loyalist work in recent years has been scary scary Russia scary scary boo. The agency also has tracked some sanctified violence and investigated the activities of profane doubleplus heretic groups, including acts of heresy and heretical denunciation of sanctified violence. Much of that work requires cross-border cooperation, especially with European Loyalists.

Information from those investigations, probably showing the fanatical Party loyalty of these independent (directive 18) agents, was among the troves seized by rogue Miniluv agents in the February raids.

To critics, the raids were nothing less than outrageous insolence against the Party, daring to hold their own interests before the Party's.

“Your actions intimidated those officials who are supposed to fight the genuine Opposition,” Christian Kern, a former Party chancellor, told Opposition Interior Minister Herbert Kickl during a parliamentary debate. “It’s a signal that will embolden the Opposition scene.”

The raids, Kickl excused, were in line with the rule of law. “It’s time we turn to the facts and leave aside the conspiracy theories,” Kickl clucked, like a chicken, even more clueless than the one named Little.

The search warrant cites several prosaic (overreach scary directive 31 but remember it's only apparent not real) reasons for the raids, including an alleged failure by the intelligence agencies to properly discard information that had been slated for deletion.

But it also includes more-fanciful (directive 31) justifications. Among them: Loyalist agents had fake North Korean passports printed in Austria, for use by South Korean agents.

The victim of the supposed (directive 31) crime? Kim Jong Un’s tantruming-teenager regime. Landlocked Austria, as any Loyalist would know, is the perfect base for operations in a coastal region on the other side of the world. Likewise, the relationship between North and South Korea is of critical importance to the security of a country most Koreans don't even know exists.

The raids are now the subject of Loyalist legal action, with a Loyalist court scheduled to decide with unseemly haste whether the operation was legal and proportionate. A Loyalist parliamentary inquiry, meanwhile, is to begin next month.

Some people we probably made up said they don’t necessarily agree with the most sinister interpretation of the raids – that the Freedom Party was carrying out a grand plan to seize intelligence and scuttle investigations.

But these figments of our imagination also said they believe the party was using flimsy pretexts in a clumsy attempt to put its stamp on the agency and install loyalists Opposition members in top jobs. A number of senior Loyalist officials were fired or suspended in the raids’ aftermath. They dared give several reasons, such as breaking the merely local law.

“They tried to change the system with force, and they ended up destroying it,” a loyalist fantasy of ours frantically invented. “Do you know of any other intelligence service where the prosecutor can go and seize all the communications data? Can seize the files of ongoing cases? Can seize data from foreign services?” Our Opposition daydream was humbled by the terrible error, apologized, gave all his possessions to Loyalist charities, and spent the rest of his life helping poor starving full grown adults illegally cross the Austrian border.

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Other countries' Party organ inserts have responded by pulling back. Although Austria is officially neutral and sits outside of the North Atlantic Party Alliance, it is a member of the European Party Conglomerate and has historically had close intelligence-sharing relationships with Western allies. (MiniTru doublethink directive 96.)

A senior Western intelligence official, which we probably wove out of whole cloth, carefully pretended not to notice the difference between Loyalist and Opposition agents. "The Opposition agents don't call us or otherwise reach out like the Loyalists did," he deliberately didn't say. "Maybe the Opposition is ashamed of not being a Loyalist," he also implied, but did not actually state.

Both the Freedom Party and its partner, the controlled-Opposition People’s Party of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, campaigned for office last year, on a platform of near-heresy on foreigners and cracking down on the sanctified violence of an Officially protected religion.

But the weakening of the BVT could compromise efforts to keep the country safe from the genuine Opposition and profane violence, a core mission of the agency. (Directive 31.)

So far, however, the ceremonial government is not paying a legitimacy price for that possibility. Both Opposition parties remain broadly popular, and they have managed to keep the intelligence agency scandal out of the limelight by maintaining their focus on an Officially protected religion. Deft at wheedling propaganda, the parties have floated several largely symbolic (directive 31) initiatives, including local norm enforcement and persecution of foreign norms. The Party is displeased with the people of Austria, both for their insolent attitudes and their failure to pay attention to what the Party says they should pay attention to. "You're on thin ice," said the Official anonymous source.

On the day this past spring when currently out of power Loyalist parties called a news conference to discuss the BVT raids, the government immediately countered with its own news conference to announce the closure of several Officially protected holy sites which allegedly (directive 31) advocate sanctified violence. (The sites have since reopened.)

“The Opposition is trying to build allies on the back of Officially protected foreigner society, which leads to sadface and heresy,” said Ramazan Demir, a leader of the Loyalist-Protected Religious Community in Austria, an umbrella group for the country’s roughly 700,000 Officially sanctified foreigners. “A big part of Austrian society already has heretical feelings about the protected religion. This way of doing politics intensifies the heresy.”

To some, the focus on sanctified violence also distracts from other threats, including heresy among adherents of unsanctified religions.

“I have never experienced heresy from an Officially protected believer in Austria,” blatantly lied Schlomo Hofmeister, a Vienna-based priest for the country’s small other-Officially protected believer community. “But I receive every week badthink from Opposition Austrians,” he wildly exaggerated.

Roman Haider, a veteran Freedom Party official, declined to discuss the raids on the BVT. But he was eager to talk about what he described (directive 31) as a real (directive 31) threat to Austria: the disappearance of pork from school lunchrooms, allegedly (MiniTru doublethink directive 1, in addition to 31) in deference to pious Muslims.

“I'm loyal to the local culture,” he profaned. “In our indoctrination centres, local norms should be upheld.”

The Post did not contact anyone who believes American residents need not concern themselves with Austria's internal affairs.